About

Hi, Hola, Bonjour

My name is Tilly and I apparently love puns.

Welcome to my blog, which hopefully will give you some photographic and written inspiration, and keep you buzzing about seeing the world, untilz the next time you travel (see what I did there? *cough*).

If you have a moment, check out my most recent articles, featured in the following publications:

Why travel?

My first time really living away from home was when I was sixteen and went on a two month exchange to Paris through my high school, which proved to me the importance of immersing yourself in a culture to perfect a foreign language. I was young, though, and I didn’t really get the chance to make the most of being in France and travel, but I did come back home with my French pretty much fluent.

I was lucky enough to get to travel a fair bit with my family growing up. My Mum was a travel journalist for a long time and she fed me thrilling stories of all the places she visited.

As I grew older I craved the adventure of figuring it all out for myself. So in 2016 I did just that, packing up to study for a semester abroad in Salamanca, Spain. This time, I was determined not only to perfect my Spanish, but to see as much as possible. I’d planned to travel for a few months before my exchange, see as much as possible during the semester and then go back home, but I fell so in love with being abroad that I kept delaying my return date, amounting to a beautiful, challenging, life changing year spent exploring.

As a French, Spanish and psychology University student from Auckland, New Zealand, it was amazingly refreshing to use my degree all the time. Back home, being so far away from Europe and the rest of the world, my opportunities to do this were few and far between, but I chatted in French and Spanish every day, making so many friends from every corner of the world in Salamanca. I spent two and a half months working in a hostel in Barcelona where I was once again blessed to meet many a beautiful soul.

I learned so much about the world and myself, figuring out what I actually wanted to do with my degree (become a translator one day!) but, more importantly, that before completing it I actually wanted to pursue another dream I’d had since I was a toddler… so after working in Barça I auditioned for a performing arts school in Cheltenham, England, where I now live.

Why the blog?

If I’m honest, the blog has partially selfish motives. As I mentioned above, I’ve always been one to juggle several dreams at once. Creating a travel blog or being a travel journalist was one of those dreams for a long time. Now that I’ve actually experienced the highs and lows of it, and have settled down once again in one spot, I experience wanderlust pretty much all the time, so writing about the places I saw lets me relive some of those experiences.

I’ve read a lot of articles that paint travel as luxurious and carefree, and while it can be, as a student I often experienced a lot of the lows – but these were what helped me learn and figure things out. I constantly made and still make mistakes travelling (and in life in general – I mean, who doesn’t?), and often reflect on how I might have done things differently at the time. Hopefully anything I share here will help other students or travel wannabes going on a similar sort of adventure. If all else fails, hopefully you’ll stick around anyway for some more stellar puns.

1 thought on “About”

I think that writing a blog is a great way to achieve the goals you outline. It is good that you will write about the highs and the lows, since not only will they help other adventurous travelers like you avoid some pitfalls, otherwise it will read like advertisements and those are boring!